Patrick Kennedy knocks Brown ad

Former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, the son of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, is demanding that Sen. Scott Brown stop invoking his father’s name in his radio ad about insurance coverage for birth control, charging the Massachusetts Republican is making “misleading and untrue” claims.

“You are entitled to your own opinions, of course, but I ask that, moving forward, you do not confuse my father’s positions with your own. I appreciate the past respect you have expressed for his legacy, but misstating his positions is no way to honor his life’s work,” Kennedy said in a letter to Brown on Sunday published online. “I respectfully request that you immediately stop broadcast of this radio ad and from citing my father any further.”

Story Continued Below

Kennedy was referring to Brown’s new radio ad in which he says, “Like Ted Kennedy before me, I support a conscience exemption in health care for Catholics and other people of faith.”

Brown continues in the one-minute message, “I believe it’s possible to provide people with access to the health care they want, while at the same time protecting the rights of Americans to follow their religious beliefs.”

Kennedy argues in his letter to the freshman senator — who won a special election to carry out the rest of Sen. Kennedy’s term after his death — that his father was dedicated to providing health care coverage to every American and that Brown’s support for the Blunt Amendment is “an attack on that cause.”

“My father never would have supported this extreme legislation,” Kennedy wrote.

Brown, who is expected to have a tough race against likely Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren, wrote in response to Kennedy that he and the late senator would have “found common ground” on the importance of protecting people’s right to practice their religion without government interference.

“I’d like to think your dad would have been working with me to find an accommodation that all sides found satisfactory,” Brown said. “One thing I know he would not do is demagogue the issue, or inflame passions against the church, as Elizabeth Warren has done. It is simply wrong to set one group of Americans against another over religion.”

The feud comes as the Obama administration is mired in a controversy over its requirement that mandates religious-affiliated employers to provide workers free contraception coverage. In a recent compromise, President Barack Obama tweaked the rule to drop the requirement for faith-related workplaces by passing on the responsibility to insurance companies instead.